Welcome to the Triple Crown of Blockchains. Enter Tezos: The Dark Horse [Part II]
This is a continuation of Part I where I started covering the fundamentals of Tezos’ underlying technology and why it is the “Dark Horse” of the crypto space.
Although blockchains are a relatively new technology, we are seeing a rapid evolution with new projects. All touting grandeur features and trying to bring the “next best thing” that will capture the hearts and minds of users only before their moment of glory is overshadowed by the next “new thing”. The never ending pattern typically leads to the same results which can be summed up by the old adage, “play stupid games, win stupid prizes”. The aftermath is the same, a fade into the obscure darkness of dead projects.
Only projects with well thought-out proven fundamentals will become a leader in this digital revolution. The snake-oil salesmen may be flashy, but it’s all hype with no substance. The thing the salesmen touts might be shiny today, but that shine will wear off by tomorrow and once the shine is gone, it will go into the vast land of dead projects. Tezos is the complete opposite and that’s why I believe Tezos, with its proven tech and adaptability skills, is the “Dark Horse” that will emerge at the head of the pack. As I said in Part I…
…It’s not a matter of “if” , but a matter of “when” Tezos will become a leader.
As mentioned in Part I, Tezos is an open-source platform for assets and applications that can evolve by upgrading itself. Contrary to other popular blockchain projects, the Tezos protocol is not an EVM fork that simply copies and forks Ethereum or another blockchain. It is a protocol built from the ground up that constantly evolves by implementing the best technology. As Darwin has famously noted, evolution is the only thing that has withstood the test of time and is one of the best means of survival. Tezos is battle tested and has proven time over time through its evolution of protocol upgrades that it’s ready for mass adoption.
In Part I, I covered the first three points of Tezos’ technology from a fundamental analysis point of view:
1. Proof of Stake
2. Delegation
3. Self Amendment
So let’s continue to Part II and cover the following:
4. On-Chain Governance
5. Decentralized Innovation
6. Smart Contracts and Formal Verification
4) On-Chain governance
One of the greatest features Tezos has implemented from day one, is its on-chain governance mechanism. This feature allows every stakeholder to participate and have a say in the protocol’s future, either by being bakers (validators) and voting on (or injecting new) upgrade proposals, or by delegating (holding tez and delegating to a baker) their voting rights to a baker whose voting interests are aligned with their own stance.
This mechanism further improves the decentralization level of Tezos as the decision making process for the future of the protocol is in the hands of many and not a few “key holders”. Tezos doesn’t just talk the talk of decentralization, but walks the walk with 11 proposals voted into the protocol.
The governance process is designed to work completely on-chain (100% transparency) and it is composed of the following 5 periods:
- Proposal period: Any validator can inject upgrade proposals for the protocol
- Exploration Vote Period: Validators vote on the proposals they want to move to the next phase. Only one moves to the next phase.
- Cooldown Period: This is where the community takes time to discuss and test the proposal for possible bugs.
- Promotion Vote period: This is the period where the final vote happens on whether to implement the proposal or not.
- Adoption Period: Last period of the process that gives time to the community to prepare for the activation of the upgrade proposal.
(You can check at which governance phase Tezos is at any moment, or even check all the past phases by going to Tezos Agora.)
The whole governance process takes roughly ~2.5 months from start to finish and it gives Tezos the ability to evolve much faster than its competitors while allowing it to always stay on the cutting edge of blockchain technology.
While other projects need years to implement a single upgrade, Tezos in 2022 alone has implemented 3 major upgrades and is already moving towards its 12th upgrade total!
Previous Upgrades: Athens (May, 2018), Babylon (October, 2019), Carthage (March, 2020), Delphi (September, 2020), Edo (February 2021), Florence (May, 2021), Granada (August, 2021), Hangzhou (December, 2021), Ithaca (April 2022), Jakarta (June, 2022), Kathmandu (September 2022), coming soon (Lima).
Always. Keep. Evolving. Tezos. By doing so, this will always give the “Dark Horse” the puncher’s chance to become the frontrunner. All it takes is one good punch and it’s night-night.
5) Decentralized Innovation
When it comes to blockchains, one of the main things you want to see is a healthy level of decentralization. If it’s not decentralized, permissionless, and censorship resistant then you are probably missing the whole point of this technology.
While looking at decentralization and how it pertains to Tezos, at the time of writing Tezos has 409 Bakers and almost 4,800 nodes spread all over the world
One reason for this well spread out distribution and adoption, is due to Tezos’ permissionless nature that allows anyone to become a baker (validator) and verify the transactions of the network as long as they have the required “stake” (6000 tez). One of the hidden beauties in the required stake to become a baker is that even if the baker doesn’t have the entire 6000 tez, he/she can have people delegate to that respective baker and as long as their cumulative stake amount is 6000 tez, that baker will get baking rights. For example, if the baker only has 1000 tez, as long as another person(s) delegates 5000 tez to that baker, that baker will get baking rights and start baking (validating) on the network. The icing on the cake is that hardware requirements to become a baker are also very low compared to other blockchains which has helped with the inclusivity as it doesn’t require you to buy super expensive machines to contribute to the network’s security. For example, people can still run their bakeries on a Raspberry Pi!
In the topic of decentralization, the number of nodes is not the only well distributed part of the ecosystem, but also the entire token distribution is one of the best, meaning the tokens are distributed more to the people than to single entities like venture capital firms.
6) Smart Contracts & Formal Verification
The Tezos protocol is written in OCaml, a general purpose industrial-strength programming language with an emphasis on expressiveness and safety. Tezos uses Michelson as the base programming language that smart contracts are running on which gives the ability to developers to formally verify them. Formal verification is a technique that mathematically proves the correctness of a program’s design, this helps to exclude a variety of errors and bugs from the smart contracts of your application. Stated differently, it allows developers to prove the properties of their smart contracts.
This is another advantage that adds to the “Dark Horse’s” arsenal of traits over other blockchains as formal verification is a very useful and important tool especially if you want institutional adoption of your chain. There’s a long list of major organizations that use formal verification methods at their organizations such as: NASA, Jane Street Capital, IBM, and many others.
It is important to note that you don’t need to know how to develop in Michelson to write smart contracts on Tezos as there are a variety of other high level languages you can choose from that can effectively compile down to Michelson as some of the most popular languages used are SmartPy (Python), Ligo (Pascal, OCaml, Reason, Js) and Archetype. (For more information, please see here.)
These are some of the most important fundamental points that make Tezos one of the most advanced blockchains in the blockchain space. A battle tested technology that was designed to adapt and not only survive crypto winters, but keep evolving and constantly fine tuning itself “on the go” to finally rise as the winner of this race. This is the stuff that gives the “Dark Horse” the edge.
In a space where everyone is trying to predict the future and build on the hype of “the next best thing”, Tezos is focused on executing and delivering without sacrificing important traits like decentralization and being permissionless.
If you enjoyed Part I and II, make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss Part III of this series where we will cover some lesser known, but just as amazing features of Tezos including the adoption it has already received by big industry names all over the world and of course the great community that it has built around it!
